Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all. 
I was the wind that dappled the lush grass,
The tide that crept with coolness to its roots, 190
The thin-winged swallow skating on the air;
The life that gladdened everything was mine. 
Was I then truly all that I beheld? 
Or is this stream of being but a glass
Where the mind sees its visionary self,
As, when the kingfisher flits o’er his bay,
Across the river’s hollow heaven below
His picture flits,—­another, yet the same? 
But suddenly the sound of human voice
Or footfall, like the drop a chemist pours, 200
Doth in opacous cloud precipitate
The consciousness that seemed but now dissolved
Into an essence rarer than its own. 
And I am narrowed to myself once more.

For here not long is solitude secure,
Nor Fantasy left vacant to her spell. 
Here, sometimes, in this paradise of shade,
Rippled with western winds, the dusty Tramp,
Seeing the treeless causey burn beyond,
Halts to unroll his bundle of strange food 210
And munch an unearned meal.  I cannot help
Liking this creature, lavish Summer’s bedesman,
Who from the almshouse steals when nights grow warm,
Himself his large estate and only charge,
To be the guest of haystack or of hedge,
Nobly superior to the household gear
That forfeits us our privilege of nature. 
I bait him with my match-box and my pouch,
Nor grudge the uncostly sympathy of smoke,
His equal now, divinely unemployed. 220
Some smack of Robin Hood is in the man,
Some secret league with wild wood-wandering things;
He is our ragged Duke, our barefoot Earl,
By right of birth exonerate from toil,
Who levies rent from us his tenants all,
And serves the state by merely being.  Here
The Scissors-grinder, pausing, doffs his hat,
And lets the kind breeze, with its delicate fan,
Winnow the heat from out his dank gray hair,—­
A grimy Ulysses, a much-wandered man, 230
Whose feet are known to all the populous ways,
And many men and manners he hath seen,
Not without fruit of solitary thought. 
He, as the habit is of lonely men,—­
Unused to try the temper of their mind
In fence with others,—­positive and shy,
Yet knows to put an edge upon his speech,
Pithily Saxon in unwilling talk. 
Him I entrap with my long-suffering knife,
And, while its poor blade hums away in sparks, 240
Sharpen my wit upon his gritty mind,
In motion set obsequious to his wheel,
And in its quality not much unlike.

Nor wants my tree more punctual visitors. 
The children, they who are the only rich,
Creating for the moment, and possessing
Whate’er they choose to feign,—­for still with them
Kind Fancy plays the fairy godmother,
Strewing their lives with cheap material
For winged horses and Aladdin’s lamps,